Heading down the hill with all those people and all that neon underneath her, Isabel feels like she’s walking down out of the sky, like one of those dreams where gravity doesn’t apply. Someday her whole life will be made of moments that feel like this. When people ask “What do you want to do when you grow up?” how do you tell them that?
“What kind of sucker buys a house down there?”
“You know who buys houses down there, Isabel,” Magda laughs, “the kind of people who would actually move to a town like this on purpose.”
Kids are shuffling up and down the hill to the firemen’s fair, filing past each other with their fishnet stockings showing through the holes in their jeans, and their painted stencils of Jim Morrison glowing on the backs of their sleeveless denim jackets.
“You know what? I’m not knocking these idiots. At least when the bus can’t get up that hill in the winter, they cancel school.”
“Yeah,” Magda says, “we have these superficial morons to thank for half our snow days. Those kids, you know their parents have money, okay, but also you know they’re really not that smart either. I mean, why do all these new-money idiots let them put the firemen’s fair down here next to their built-in pools and their perfectly laid sod?”
At the bottom, it’s all cotton candy and lots of noise. Charlie is smoking in front of the Tilt-A-Whirl.
“You two, eh?” he says. “Where’s little Carter?”
“At home,” Isabel says. “Don’t you have to go to work tonight?”
“Come on, stop making small talk. Let’s go up the cliff. I just went to Matt Kerwin’s house. Scoping it out and acting like a loyal customer.”
So they climb back up to the top of the pit and into the Glinnicks’ backyard. The yard stretches right to the edge of the cliff, completely covered with lilies that wave now in the same wind that carries the fairground screams and the carny music out onto the water. Lemon lilies, red lilies, tiger lilies, Stargazers. Isabel knows that her clothes will be streaked with yellow pollen when she gets back to the light. She stands at the edge now with Charlie and Magda, all three of them with their arms stretched out straight to the sides, like they’re either flying or dying on the cross. Below them the colors of the fair are moving in circles and spinning shapes. She can’t hear the music, though. The sounds are carried away from them, out to the black sea.
“Hey, Magda.” She points at the sky over the slipway. “Which star is that?”
“It’s a planet, Isabel.”
When you sit down in the lilies, you can’t see the road, just a sheer drop to the bottom of the pit. It’s like when they climb the water tower, except if you’re coming from their neighborhood you don’t have to climb to get here. You just walk until the road stops and the earth drops away.
“So, this house is way older than the houses in the pit,” she says. “Think about it. A hundred years ago, it would have been here all by itself. The village would have been way far away, and whoever lived in this house would have been all alone on this windy cliff.”
“What are you talking about now, Isabel?” Charlie sits down at the edge of the yard and reaches for the Marlboro box in his pocket.
“Change the subject, Isabel. You’ll make Charlie bored. You wouldn’t want to do that.”
Magda thinks she’s pathetic. Maybe she is, but there’s nothing she can do about it. She already tried.
“Why are you girls all obsessed with old stuff?” Charlie says. “It’s over. It is boring. No one smoked pot or got laid, and those old clothes you’re always stealing from Attic Antiques are not sexy.”
Isabel can see Magda rolling her eyes, but Charlie doesn’t notice.
“Um, yes, they did. Thomas Jefferson grew pot, Charlie, and if they didn’t get laid, how did we get here?”
This is what happens when Magda and Charlie are together. Magda is sarcastic, Charlie doesn’t get it, and neither one of them thinks Isabel is important enough to be a full partner in the conversation.
“Hey, Charlie.” She tries to head them off. “You ever been down in Underground Highbone?”
“We tried to go in once, but it was high tide. Don’t you guys go wandering in there by yourselves. You’ll drown and people will cry and shit. Not me, other people.”
“But it’s really there, tunnels and rooms underneath town where there were speakeasies during Prohibition? I’ve been thinking about it. We need to check out Underground Highbone. It’s crazy that we haven’t gone in there yet. There’s an adventure right under Main Street we haven’t even bothered to have. It’s definitely on the list of things we need to do before we leave town.”
“Bunch of flooded basements, mainly.” Charlie snorts. “Anyway, you’re never leaving town. In twenty years you’ll be right here, sitting under a hair dryer and complaining about your kids.”
Isabel falls sideways into the lilies and looks up at Charlie’s silhouette against the sky.
“It almost feels like summer,” she says. “Soon we’ll be out all night in tank tops.”
It was summer the first time she was with Charlie. Last summer. He just showed up at the beach one night with everything she needed in his pockets.
It was July, and Isabel and Ruth had stolen some of Elizabeth’s acid. They decided to go swimming naked and set some paper lanterns on fire in the sea. It was hot, but a bunch of football players had a bonfire farther down, under the woods at Fiddler’s Cove. Isabel and Ruth were too focused on what they were doing to be scared of them, though. The air was so humid it lay on them like wet wool. They decided to swim out and lie on Captain’s Rock like two naked sirens in the moonlight. Isabel thought she could write a poem about it, and then thought how Magda would roll her eyes. Magda always says angsty and trippy are Isabel’s only two poetic modes. Just yesterday, she said the worst thing about Charlie is the way he causes Isabel to write poetry.
When Ruth came up from her first dive and the two of them stood waist-high in the Sound, the drops flew off them like pieces of glass, and the mud on the bottom was silky under their feet. Ruth looked even more celestial than usual, shining black and white in the moonlight. It was all absurdly beautiful. The rock held its granite face up to the sky and sparkled, looking like their mermaid bed. Isabel dove under and kicked.
When she stretched out her hand under the water, there was a mass of slimy tentacles instead of rock. She got tangled up in the kelpy strands and gasped while she was still under. It was like one of those black-and-white horror movies they have on Sundays. Part of her was thinking Thing from the Deep and laughing. She came up spluttering and stood still, trying to breathe again, shaking and staring while her skin tightened and the salt dried on her arms. The surface of the water is such a thin line between two completely alien worlds. That thought seemed really profound at the time, what with the acid and all.
Later, Charlie came down and found them with their clothes halfway on, and Ruth disappeared somewhere. After a while, Isabel wound up with Charlie on the wooden stairway that goes up the cliff. Just like now, she could see the sky through his corkscrew curls. It was a toenail moon that night. She knew which stars were really planets without asking Magda, by the difference in their colors. Red Mars and yellow Saturn. It was so clear, she wondered why she’d never noticed before.
The weird part was, when Charlie kissed her, her first thought was about her and Ruth and Magda, about how they could do anything. They could have anything they wanted. It seemed like being there with Charlie was her idea, the thing she wanted, and it would all go the way she wanted it to.
Well, it turns out you can only take what you want sometimes. Other times, you get shoved up against bathroom walls by syphilitic ’Nam vets. Everything has its ups and downs. Isabel laughs now, reaching up to grab Magda’s lit cigarette.
“What’s so funny?”
“I was just thinking about us.”
“Ha, ha.”
“No, I mean, we’re as stupid as anyone else sometimes.”
; “No, Isabel. Not even you’re stupid. You’re just not paying attention. Rose-colored glasses and everything. Whatever you end up writing, it’s not gonna be anything like Sister Carrie. It’ll be some floaty shit for people who don’t have to live in the real world.”
“You girls talk too much, you know that?”
“All girls talk too much, Charlie. Occupational hazard. At least Isabel is occasionally talking about something that matters. Count your blessings.”
All their words are slowing down and the wind has turned and brought the tinny music up the cliff.
That night last summer, Isabel and Charlie had kissed for long enough, and she started to feel his hands on her. The muscles in her legs and back were tightening, and she was still tripping hard. She had pictures in her head of opening flowers and waving corals and jellyfish; there was no distance between her thoughts and her body. Down the beach the football players were shouting, and she wondered where Ruth was. How long would it be before Charlie put his hand between her legs and touched her?
He was having a hard time getting through her clothes.
“You wore this on purpose, didn’t you?” he said, like she was trying to be shy or chaste or something.
As soon as she laughed and said no, she could tell she’d done something wrong. He turned three degrees colder and the sky kept turning behind him. In the light of the lamps coming down from the parking lot she could see his gray shadow drawing back inside itself, even though he was still touching her.
He ignored her for a long time after that night. It took months for him to look straight at her again. She spent every day wanting him to. The whole thing turned out to be a trap. They couldn’t actually have what they wanted, but they could want things in ways they hadn’t even dreamed of.
Now Magda and Charlie are having some kind of philosophical debate in the dark.
“I’m just saying we don’t get what we deserve any more than any other idiot.” Magda is looking at the sky through her crescent wrench, using it to pinch the moon. “There is no such thing as karma.”
“I will,” Charlie says. “I’ll get what I want. You don’t have to just take everything life dishes out. You just gotta be meaner than the other guy.”
“Can’t believe I’m saying this, Isabel, but Charlie’s not wrong.”
“Charlie’s not a girl,” Isabel says.
“That true, Charlie?” Magda laughs.
“You got a big head, little Warren, you know that?”
“Some people are just stronger and meaner than us, Magda,” Isabel says. “If they want to throw you around, they will. You know that; you just don’t want to deal with it.”
“People can only be meaner than you if you let ’em, Isabel. Isn’t that kind of what you said on the way here?”
It’s so dark now that the color is gone from the lilies in the Glinnicks’ backyard. Magdalene gets up and leans into the sky, holding the branch of a tree with one hand. Isabel looks at the shadow of her hair and her toolbox coat hanging out over the edge of the pit. The moon throws a pathway of light on the water and touches the top of Magda’s head.
“Well, I’m going back down,” she says. “You staying here, Isabel?”
“Yeah, for a while.”
Magda’s retreating shadow is silver in the moonlight, parting the dark flowers. After it disappears, Charlie rolls down into the lily leaves and pulls Isabel onto him. She knows how it works now. She is supposed to resist.
He is supposed to have to force her.
nine
ONCE MAGDALENE IS back in the middle of the crowd at the bottom of the pit, the air smells more like doughnut grease than the sea. Some of the music is recorded and blaring through terrible speakers, but there are still one or two old rides that have mechanical harmoniums. She stands and watches the booth at the back of the carousel, where metal levers are ringing up and down in the sticky darkness. It’s connected somehow to the plate that turns the platform with the horses, but the mechanism is hidden under the floor.
Every few minutes, someone she knows passes by and she has to wave. Then she goes back to imagining the gears under the carousel. It’s self-contained; that’s what’s so good about a mechanism. It uses the exact same amount of energy it takes. No excess. No spillage.
She runs into Jeff Snyder at one of the booths, shooting at little pop-up Hitlers with a BB gun. He puts his hand on her when he says hello, just lays the BB gun down and puts his hand on the small of her back like it’s a normal thing to do. When he touches her, the invisible membrane between her and everything else disappears, like he’s taking her swimming inside herself. She can feel every cell of her skin at once, the way you do when you dive into a lake.
It’s like someone walking into a room uninvited, but the room is her body. People look at Ruth the way Jeff is looking at her now, and Charlie started out by looking at Isabel like that. It’s the first time anyone has given her that look, though. She’s pretty sure that’s because neither of the other two is there to get it first.
She didn’t tell Ruth and Isabel about the conversation she had with Jeff on the corner of Sycamore Avenue, or the way he seemed like he was adding up all the details of her. When Isabel likes someone she just talks and talks and talks, even more than normal. He said this; his hair looks like that; his parents are assholes and don’t understand him; the last girl he was with was too ugly or too stupid; he’s reading Rilke; he listens to Captain Beefheart. On and on and on. Isabel is like Magdalene’s mother; they both have total conviction that other people should be fascinated by whatever they’re feeling or doing. Magda would just sound ridiculous if she talked about someone the way Isabel does, so she keeps it to herself. She pretends she learned about immigrant Irish socialists and the great migration and the killing floor from the books in her parents’ library instead of from Jeff.
Here and now, Jeff has his hand on her and he’s nodding towards the back of the shooting gallery truck. They sneak around into the dark between the truck and the generator. Shadows made by neon are different from other shadows—dark but they still glow. There are colors in their eyes and everything they say is punctuated by the sound coming through the back wall of the truck, little metal Hitlers clacking up and down.
He talks to her about how you can do all your complicated thinking while you work on an engine, which Magda already knows. He talks about history and how it works and why people need to think about it. He asks her all kinds of questions; she feels like she’s at a college interview. And the whole time he’s talking to her he stays so close she can feel the heat coming off him.
“When your grandparents came,” he says, “do you know why?”
“Why does anyone come to America? Money.” Right away Magda can tell she was supposed to say it differently. She is the girl; she’s supposed to say it as a question. But Jeff doesn’t notice anyway. He’s on a roll again.
“They came because they were hungry, Magdalene, and because everyone in Southern Italy was dying of cholera. So they came for shitty jobs in New York and they packed ’em in tenement buildings like sardines. In the good ol’ US of A they were still hungry and still dying of cholera and the flu. When they came through Ellis Island there was a doctor standing there to check under their eyelids for diseases. If they were okay, the doctor drew a white cross on their coats, like they were cattle. If you were a kid and you were sick they just ripped you out of your mom’s arms and stuck you in quarantine for three months.”
“Actually Nona and Nono had some money saved,” Magda says. “Nono’s dad had a shop, and they sold it after he died and came over here to buy a little farm in mid-island.” But Jeff isn’t listening.
“The people at Ellis Island only spoke English and they just thought anyone who didn’t was retarded. And speaking of retarded, they’d stop you from coming in for that, too. If you had a retarded kid, you had to choose whether to all go home or come through and leave your kid in an institution.”
“They came in a ber
th,” she says. “It was kind of different for them. If you had some money, the officials came on the boat to check your papers, and Nono could speak a little English. When he talked about it he always acted proud that he wasn’t treated like complete dirt, like he was a little bit better than the people in steerage. It was kind of a messed-up attitude, but he was a good guy really.”
“I’m just saying, is it really a surprise the guys down on the Lower West Side thought they’d maybe get organized a little?” Jeff says. “Take the bull by the horns, give as good as they got?”
“What, you mean by taking protection money off people who weren’t as strong as them, and kneecapping the people who wouldn’t pay? Not all Italians are Mafia, you know.”
He finally stops talking and looks at her for a minute. “You’re smart, aren’t you?” he says. “Pretty and smart.”
This time, when that look goes through her she can see everything at once. Isabel on the cliff above her with Charlie, the two of them crushing down the lily leaves in the Glinnicks’ backyard. She can see Vicky and her latest scars, and the eyeliner she draws around that empty sleepiness she always has in her eyes when she comes back to Highbone. She can see her own mother, walking away, but she has to make that picture up, because her mother left when Magda was asleep. Magda has a version of that picture for every situation. Except this one. She’s so distracted trying to see the picture of her mother’s retreating back that it takes a minute to pay attention when he starts to kiss her.
“So,” he says, “do you like me?” And he laughs, like it’s a rhetorical question.
“I don’t know.” Which is honest. “What is that thing you feel about people? That makes you think about them?”
“You don’t think about it, Magdalene Warren. It isn’t about thinking.”
“When you get to move out of your house,” she says, “when you get to take whatever courses you want and save up and take your car anywhere you want to go, is it better? Is it as good as you think it’s gonna be?”
Little Wrecks Page 7
